As a child, four lines drawn on paper were his strings. Now he’s a cello sensation

For a hint of the sheer joy and visceral energy South African cellist/vocalist Abel Selaocoe [“Sel-AU-chay”] brings to the stage, check out a recent live YouTube video of him performing his 2022 Cello Concerto, Four Spirits. The concert, last month, was in Hamburg with the sort of buttoned-down crowd you can find in any concert hall around the world.

After the compelling first three movements, the fourth, entitled Simunye – “We Are One” – erupts with Selaocoe inviting the audience to join in singing in his language, Sesotho. The result is extraordinarily uplifting and deeply moving, as the barrier between performer and listener melts away. At risk of asking one piece of music to do some very heavy lifting, for a brief period it gives a little ray of hope in our troubled world.

When we speak over Zoom, Selaocoe is in a hotel room in Cologne. In the middle of his European tour, he understandably seems a little tired but is unfailingly generous with his time and insights.

He grew up in the South African township of Sebokeng, south of Johannesburg. It was, he says, “a very beautiful” childhood.

“We didn’t know that we didn’t have much,” he says. “When you don’t know, you adapt very well. We made instruments out of oil boxes to learn and play. We just found a way. We recorded different concertos on cassette tape and tried to learn things like that by ear. We were very adventurous and curious, and I think that has led to how I make music today, which is such a lucky thing.”

Music was inescapable when Selaocoe was growing up.

“There’s always a bunch of people around us making music at home and older guys playing in church and in brass bands and that kind of stuff,” he says. “Music made its way into our lives as soon as we were born. It became a real part of us. It was already a language that was formed within us.”

Selaocoe began formal cello studies at Soweto’s African Cultural Organisation of South Africa (ACOSA) run by the legendary violinist and anti-apartheid campaigner Michael Masote. A major source of inspiration was his brother Sammy, who played bassoon at ACOSA.

“My brother, he’s such a unique character,” says Selaocoe. “Ever since we were young, he was looking for what would occupy us instead of the things that were happening around us in the township. My parents gave us a kind of ultimatum. It’s either you go to Saturday school and you’ll be learning maths and science and biology, or you find something that will occupy your time.”

Selaocoe wasn’t allowed to take his instrument home, so during the week he “practised” on four lines drawn on paper to represent the cello strings. “By the time we got to Saturday, my brother and I were so keen to see if our experiments worked,” he says. “Again, this is the imagination of a child, which is such a great thing.”

Guided by his inspirational cello teacher Kutlwano Masote (son of Michael), Selaocoe fell in love with the instrument and realised it could be his ticket out of the township. But even while he studied the Bach Suites and the rest of the standard repertoire, he managed to retain his childlike enthusiasm for pushing the boundaries of the instrument.

“I’ve always been trying to imitate other things, and I was taught very early that you should be able to imitate anything,” he says. “I think that was the name of the game, imitate stuff so that your imagination is expanded.

“So whenever we found African violins or super rhythmic guitar music from South Africa, we were just trying to learn that stuff on the instrument and ignore the challenges it posed. I simply did it because everybody was like, it’s just an instrument, it’s a tool. And it being a tool, we use it in that way.”

Based on his musical talent, Selaocoe won a scholarship to Johannesburg’s St John’s College, often called the South African Eton. The culture shock was profound. Initially speaking little English, he found that the “privilege was wild” at the elite school. From there he was accepted into the prestigious Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester in the UK, which he describes as both scary and exciting.

He arrived in Manchester determined to be a “straight-up” concert cellist. “I tried really hard to fit into that world and it took me a while to realise I needed to go on a bit of an identity search,” he says.

During that time, he played with African musicians around the UK and across Europe, experimenting with where his cello might fit. And gradually, he became clearer about what he wanted to play.

“I learned Bach and it’s very much a huge part of me,” he says. “So I was like, I’m going to do that, but actually at the same time, I will program music that I write or I’ll program African music. My teacher was luckily very open-minded. She was allowing me to go play folk festivals and world music festivals and come back with a bunch of knowledge, but also still be playing cello studies and doing all the things I needed to do. So that education was very life-changing.”

Selaocoe began experimenting with singing while playing, sometimes employing the unique overtone techniques traditionally used by Xhosa women, as well as improvising rather than sticking strictly to the notes on the page in front of him.

His latest album, Hymns of Bantu, is a paean to the universality of the human condition. Leading off with Selaocoe’s sublime Tsohle Tsohle, a Sesotho phrase meaning “everything is everything”, it also includes a Bach cello suite and an improvisation on a theme by 18th-century French composer Marin Marais. It’s an eclectic combination but in Selaocoe’s hands creates a glorious whole that is way more than the sum of its parts.

Next month, Selaocoe will visit Australia for the first time for a series of concerts with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. “They approached me and I felt very honoured that they reached out because they saw the kind of music that I play, and they imagined that we could fit and we could do something together,” says Selaocoe. “This is a beautiful gamble, and I’m really looking forward to it.”

The program is suitably diverse, taking in several of Selaocoe’s own compositions alongside works by 18th-century Italian composer Giovanni Benedetto Platti and contemporary Italian composer Giovanni Sollima. Selaocoe will bring with him West African percussion virtuoso Sidiki Dembélé.

Selaocoe believes the concert experience can, at its best, be transformative. “It’s about faith, but faith in a very universal sense that we all need to find a way of surviving because we can’t buy the next moment,” he says. “Gathering at concerts is a huge thing. It can make us think in the same way and understand each other a whole lot more. If I can get that across in the music, that’s my goal.”

Abel Selaocoe tours with the Australian Chamber Orchestra from April 3 to 15.

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